I’m going shopping this weekend, and someone else is picking up the bill. I’ve known since Wednesday. That knowledge has been sitting warmly in my chest all week – not a plan exactly, more like a promise I made to myself that I have absolutely no intention of breaking.
I’ve already been thinking about what I want. Not in a vague, idle way – specifically. There’s a coat I’ve been watching for three weeks, waiting for the right moment to collect it, and that moment is Saturday. There are other things too. Things I don’t know I want yet, which are always the most expensive discoveries – the ones that announce themselves the second you touch them and make the price entirely irrelevant. I love those moments. The absolute certainty of wanting. No deliberation, no guilt, no wondering whether I need it. I don’t operate on need. I operate on want, and my wants are very well-funded.
The bill isn’t mine. I want to be clear about that because there’s a particular pleasure in saying it plainly. Someone will be covering what I spend this weekend – not because I asked, not because I negotiated, not because I performed gratitude in exchange for generosity. Because that’s the arrangement. Because I have built a life in which the cost of my pleasure is someone else’s problem and the problem is considered a privilege. I spend freely. They pay fully. I come home with bags I don’t have to justify to anyone, and they sit somewhere in their ordinary life knowing their money became something I’m wearing.
I find that genuinely delicious. Not as a concept – as a physical reality. The coat will be on my body. The fragrance will be on my skin. Whatever else I acquire this weekend will be mine to touch, to wear, to enjoy entirely without reference to whoever funded it. They won’t see it. They certainly won’t see it on me. They’ll get the receipt notification if they’re lucky, and that notification is the entirety of their involvement. The ache that produces – that specific, particular ache of having paid for something beautiful you’ll never get near – that’s not my concern. That’s the whole point.
I don’t rush when I shop. I want to make that clear too, because the image some people have of spending – frantic, greedy, slightly undignified – has nothing to do with how I do it. I move slowly. I look at things properly. I let a room reveal itself to me. I’ll pick something up, feel its weight, put it down, walk to the other side of the shop, come back. I’ll try on three versions of the same thing and choose none of them and then, ten minutes later, return to the first one. Shop assistants who know me understand that patience is required. They also understand that when I decide, I decide, and there’s no point waiting for me to change my mind because I won’t.
What I’m looking forward to most – beyond the coat, beyond whatever else announces itself as mine – is the quality of the afternoon. The particular pleasure of a Saturday spent entirely in the service of my own desires. No agenda except what I want. No interruptions. No one requiring anything from me. Just good light, beautiful things, and the clean satisfaction of a card that processes without drama because the balance is not my problem.
You’ll be thinking about this, and I’m not going to pretend otherwise. That’s partly why I’m writing it. There’s something I enjoy about the knowledge that you’ll spend part of your weekend aware of what I’m doing – aware that I’m somewhere handling things you funded, selecting things you’ll never see, moving through an afternoon that is entirely and deliberately mine. You’re not in the shop. You’re not invited. You’re in the account, which has been prepared for exactly this purpose, and the distance between where you are and where I am is the thing that makes your chest tight in that specific, familiar way.
I won’t be sharing what I get. There’ll be no haul, no photographs of bags laid out on a bed, no receipt posted for your inspection. You don’t get that. What you get is exactly what you always get – the knowledge that it happened, that it was your money, and that I came home pleased with myself and completely indifferent to whether you knew the details. The not-knowing is yours to keep. It’s one of the few things I’m leaving you.
Send something before I go. Not as a request – I don’t request. As a simple acknowledgement that you understand what this weekend is, what your role in it is, and that participation from a distance is still participation. By the time I’m back and settled with a glass of something and the bags are where they belong, the window will have closed. It always does. And you’ll spend Sunday night knowing whether you were part of it or not.
I’m already looking forward to it. I’ve been looking forward to it all week.
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